"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
- Jeffrey Hammerbacher
Unless your brand is a limited stock edition, you will need to fight tooth and nail to retain your position in the market. With a plethora of products and their substitutes flooding the market, how do you make a consumer remember you? The answer is easy - Treat him with an experience he cannot forget.
“In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.”
- David Ogilvy
A brand which almost always went a step ahead to delight its consumers is Coca-Cola. An excellent example of making people feel special is the Coke Hello Happiness Campaign. In UAE, where the daily wage is approximately $6 per day and the charges for international calls is $0.91 per minute, the labourers who came in from different countries to work there, could hardly afford to talk to their families back home. Coca- Cola installed a special booth where the bottle caps of the soft drink served as currency, giving 3 minutes of happy calling back home. Now that’s one of the rare instances when the brand experience comes as a reward to consumers. Such experiences give way to a loyal customer base.
People always remember their first time. In an attempt to give people a small taste of how easy and fun online shopping can be, we helped Yebhi.com create virtual walls in various Café Coffee Day outlets. The wall was designed to look similar to a clothing rack and allowed people to shop online with NFC enabled technology in their phones, as they waited for their orders. With more than 150 online media PR stories in the first week itself, the campaign got the first time consumers to shop online. Around 8000 consumers tapped and shopped online on the spot.
“Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark.
You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.”
- Stuart H. Britt
Talking about letting people know what you are doing, it’s also very important for you to know why you are doing anything. If you decide to go down the experiential marketing way, here is how your brand will get a boost:
- You create something tangible:
When people see and feel something that moves them or lingers in their memory, it is highly likely that they will share it further. Nobody loves anything more than talking about their experiences and what they gained from it. - Let the consumers experience your awesomeness:
When people get a chance to interact with your brand, they get a better idea of who you are. This is also an excellent way to bring in new consumers who may like your brand once they have experienced it.
Banking on the concept of familiarity of the brand, Carlsberg came up with ‘probably the best poster in the world’. Here a poster with a beer tap was put up on Brick Lane, London. Before long, a long line of people was seen in front of the poster, all waiting for their turn. It was a treat for beer lovers, especially the ones who had never tasted Carlsberg.
- Build a two-way communication:
When a brand connects with people on an emotional level, it is readily accepted. Experiential marketing targets this very need of the consumers to participate which makes your campaign a success.
- Call-to-Action:
Every brand wants the consumers to try their product before they can form an opinion. Experiential marketing just does that and it does it better because you have a huge say in how people are going to see your product.
You can make the most of the traditional ‘free sample’ opportunity and get people to do more than just try your product, you can make them love it!
- Standout from the regular advertising clutter:
In a sea of grey, red draws a lot of attention.
When you do something different, you are bound to steal the spotlight from all the other campaigns running on the traditional old route, giving your brand an edge.
After all, what is the point of advertising if you are just one in the herd?
